Chapter Fifteen Adela
It’s been four days since the deaths. Three full days of preparation.
Three full days of mourning. And now, on the fourth, the souls of the priest and Bartholomew are ready to cross into the after.
We will also say goodbye to the creatures, Duschwa, Gilcriss, and the cath palug that Etana killed.
The gryphon’s remains were never found. As matcher, I have no specific role in funerals, and yet, I am expected to be present.
But I cannot manage to get myself out of bed.
All my expectations around what my life is and will be have shifted. I can’t find my balance.
The reckless part of me just wants to jump. Into Kian’s bed. Into his arms. Like Cecelia said we should, to unlock the magic. But I’ve spent a lifetime trying to repress those reckless parts. Embracing them could mean disaster.
I hear Dad’s footsteps moving around the house, preparing. I have to get up. Instead, I bury my face in a pillow and pull the quilts over my head.
My nose is instantly full of the scent of Kian. He’s lingered in my bed long after he left it.
I think of the way he touched me in the library, his hand wrapped around the back of my neck so his thumb could gently push on the edge of my jaw and tilt my face ever so slightly up.
I wish he would have kissed my neck and jaw, dipped below my phoenix skull to reach my eager lips. Or maybe taken his kisses even lower.
There is a knock at my door.
I groan and throw back the covers. “Go without me. I’ll be there.”
“Planning on it,” Dad replies through the closed door. “In the meantime, you have a visitor. Novitiate Kian is—”
I hurry out of bed and across the room, flinging open the door. “Here? Now?” Did I somehow beckon him with my longing for that almost-kiss? Did the phoenix?
“That got you going quick.” Dad’s eyes crinkle in amusement. “He’s downstairs.”
In many ways, keeper funerals are the opposite of the matching ceremonies. There are no special garments, no elaborate hairstyles or jewelry, no specific words to say. Our final goodbyes are as simple as our everyday goodbyes.
Especially for the creatures, who don’t quite leave us.
Their skulls are set aside for immediate cleaning and preparing.
Their bodies are prepared in the usual ways, with herbs and prayers of thanks to the great goddess.
And then we bury them, returning their energies, and magic, back to the earth.
Usually. But only out of necessity. Since there is a dragon-matched novitiate present and dragon fire is the only thing that can burn creature bones, today’s funerals will involve burning.
Fire will return them more quickly to the valley than burial.
I dress just as I normally would and try not to spiral into despair at the thought of how many we’ve lost since I released the magic of the phoenixes.
“Hello!” Kian says when I enter the kitchen.
He is wearing bright red, the funeral color of the orders.
As the valley’s tailor, Cecelia’s mom has been working on their robes since they arrived, roping in her daughters to help.
As usual, she’s done an excellent job, even embroidering the cuffs, which sparkle in the kitchen window’s streaming light as he reaches for a mug of tea from Dad.
“What brings you here?” I ask. He takes up so much of my small kitchen. Not with his size—it’s his presence that overwhelms me.
Before Kian replies, Dad says he’ll see us shortly and bustles off.
It’s just me and Kian, alone. I avoid staring at him by grabbing an apple from a wooden bowl on the counter and take a big bite.
“I know we need to… explore.” Kian’s voice is low and full of promise.
“We do,” I agree, not liking the way my voice is thin and reedy with desire.
There is a tug toward him, a distraction of knowing where he is and wanting to be there with him.
I need to explore that. To quench it or embrace it.
At the moment, with the almost-kiss of the library still echoing through me, embracing it sounds best.
Surely he feels this, too.
He gestures to me to sit and takes the hand that isn’t holding the apple in his. He traces his fingers along mine. “But today is for saying goodbyes and I don’t want to rush our mourning.”
Oh. I sit back, pulling my hand away, and take another bite. Or perhaps he feels nothing for me. Around the apple I say, “Were you and the priest close then?”
“Brother Thad was…” Kian searches for the word, but apparently never finds it. He shrugs, not finishing the thought.
“Well. Then I can see why you would want time to say goodbye. Funny, I thought that was what the three days of preparation and grieving were for, but maybe you do things differently in Insborough than we do here in the valley?” I take three large bites of the apple in quick succession and throw the rest into the compost crock on the counter.
“I think we do a great many things differently,” he says.
Whatever that means.
“But we can still tell when we’ve hurt someone. I’m sorry for the delay. I can’t wait to have your body on mine again. I think about it constantly. Incessantly. Our first time was rushed. I want this next time to be… luxurious.”
His words have more of an effect on me than I would like. When he says it like that, sweetening the disappointment, like honey on Brie, I can hardly begrudge him a bit more time.
I nod slightly, and a smile lights up his beautiful face.
“Tomorrow then?” he asks.
“Tomorrow,” I agree. Then, because I am slightly petty and don’t want to be the only one questioning where they stand, I say, “No need to rush.”
Except that he and the order will hopefully be leaving soon, and I will be staying. As long as I can get this skull off my face and sever the bond with the phoenix. Which is definitely what I want.
He gives me a look and I imagine that beneath his phoenix skull, he has raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. But he just smirks and stands. “Ready to go to say some goodbyes?”
There is not a speck of grief in this man’s voice, but we all have our own ways.
We walk across the village to an open field where there are four pyres. It’s farther out than we typically do our funerals, but I suppose the newly matched dragon-wearer did destroy two cath palugs and burn a couple of fields with his overexuberance.
As befits his personality and station, Dad moves to the front. I follow, understanding what’s expected of me as matcher, even as my feet feel as if they are tied to fence posts firmly planted in a winter ground.
I do not want to see this. I do not want to be here.
Just as I drag myself into position beside Dad and Petra, the novitiate wearing the dragon skull lights the pyres for Gilcriss, Duschwa, and the cath palug. I wonder if the dragon skull has any feelings about burning its own body.
The heat is immense, but I barely register it. There’s something buzzing under my skin—unsettled and rising. Complex feelings flow from the phoenix into me, but I don’t understand them. There’s tension, like a string stretched too tight.
Beneath my buzzing is a heaviness, almost a yearning. Grief?
I’m not sure which feelings belong to whom.
“From the valley,” the keepers say as we watch the pyres burn. There is a faint briny smell on the breeze, there and gone, replaced with smoke and ash. Before we finish the words, the bodies of the creatures are gone. “To the valley.”
The phoenix pulses with a note of relief and a deeper contentment. This, at least, is right.
We turn to the next pyre, taller than the creatures.
Bartholomew.
My mentor for seventeen years, and a good one, I suppose. Not kind or patient or pleasant, but he took his role as my teacher seriously and he was thorough. My failures were my own. He made sure of that.
No family steps forward to share final goodbyes. He always said his dragons were his only family. But one killed him and is hiding in the forest. The other is about to be used to burn his body.
Part of me hopes that the skull mourns, that the bonds we form with those closest to us continue into the after.
I think of the phoenix I am wearing and the bond I cannot break with her. And of Etana, who is standing a far distance away. As soon as I matched with the phoenix, she stopped following me around the valley. But today many of the creatures are nearby, watching closely.
A lock of my hair blows in the wind and gets caught on the beak of the phoenix, so it’s covering one eye. I brush it away, back behind the skull. It’s a small movement, but it steadies me for a beat.
The elders didn’t ask me to speak. Of course they didn’t. They don’t want me standing in front of everyone, wearing a skull, reminding everyone of my failures. Of their deaths.
I’m too strange. Too wrong.
I can feel eyes on me, watching to see what I’ll do next. Or maybe they’re waiting for me to realize what they already believe. I do not belong here anymore.
Petra steps forward. She lights a torch from the embers of Gilcriss’s pyre and moves to Bartholomew’s.
“Thank you for your care and keeping,” we say as his pyre is lit. The fire explodes upward. That heat, that force—but this time it feels more personal. Like it’s burning away part of me, too. My past. My future.
I stare into the flames, feeling them lick at the edges of my shame.
It is so fast. I barely blink and what’s left of my mentor is gone. He will serve the valley in his death as he did in life.
But me? How will I serve the valley now?
The rest of the day we pass along to the high priestess. The order funerals are much more elaborate than ours. There are songs and prayers, places where we kneel and stand, and many, many calls and responses.
I’m not there. I am in the wind, swaying in the trees, in the sun as the day lengthens.
Toward the end I want to snatch a torch and set the priest ablaze myself. I cannot stand another moment of ritual; another moment chanting about goodbyes. But I don’t have to.
Finally, High Priestess Sarai lights the pyre. Finally, it is done.
Everyone meanders away except me. I stand frozen in my own self-loathing as piles of soft gray ash begin to dissipate in the wind. Everything that was left of these five lives—gone.
Because of me.